Inkjet printers are widely used in offices, houses and by individuals nowadays. With increasing awareness of environmental protection, more and more products are designed with recycling and a reusable concept. As the ink cartridge of inkjet printers is a consumption material, besides to improve the printing quality, vendors also try to explore the possibility of recycling the ink cartridge. This has become one of the focuses of product design these days.
There are three types of the ink-refilling apparatus. The first one has an external injection tube to inject ink into the cartridge. The cartridge has an ink-storing chamber, ink-supply chamber and ink-channeling element to perform an ink-refilling operation.
The second one has a coupling trough on one side of the ink cartridge to enable a chip to be movably wedged therein. The third one includes a positioning unit, duct and ink storing unit. The positioning unit includes an anchor seat fixedly located on the printer case and a detachable coupling member to form a duct anchoring mechanism in the printer.
While the cited references can function reasonably well to achieve some specific effects, there are still rooms for improvement. For instance, the first type of the ink-refilling apparatus is the most commonly used ink replenishment technique at present. It has to inject ink into the ink storing chamber of the ink cartridge through the injection tube, then a tubular ink channeling element is used to channel the ink to the ink supply chamber of the ink cartridge. Its structure is complicated. Fabrication is difficult and cost is higher. The second one has an ink cartridge with a movable chip that allows the chip to be recycled and used repeatedly. While the chip may be reclaimed, the ink cartridge has to be discarded after the ink has been consumed. Hence the environmental pollution problem because of the discarded ink cartridge still remains unresolved. In the continuous ink supply apparatus proposed by the third one, users have to send the printers to the printer manufacturers for modification to install the positioning unit on the rear side of the printer. A duct has to be connected to the ink-storing unit when in use. This method of relying on the manufacturers for installation is not convenient to users. Moreover, such a design is targeted to selected types of printers. For used elements, installation locations and dimensions have to be designed to match the interior space of the selected printers. Hence this is not applicable to other types of printers.
All this shows that the conventional techniques or products now on the market still have problems to be solved.